Children’s education helps them develop self-discipline and become more independent. Educators use different activities to teach them how to manage their behaviour in new environments.
They learn to listen and respect others’ opinions, take turns in conversations, and interact positively with each other. This experience also teaches them to live in a diverse society and understand that everyone has different skills and talents.
Learning through play
Play, in all its forms — solitary, dramatic, parallel, social, cooperative, onlooker, object, fantasy, or physical – is an effective teaching strategy (Parker and Thomsen 2020). Learning through play offers a unique opportunity for children to practice skills that are not readily available when they complete worksheets.
During their play, children learn to think creatively and solve problems. They also learn to take risks and manage emotions. They develop communication skills through verbal and non-verbal dialogue with their peers, and they can build their vocabulary as they learn about new topics.
Teachers are well versed in creating playful and joyful experiences to support social goals, but they may need additional guidance to incorporate learning through play as a pedagogy to meet more content-focused educational objectives. Research supports that discovery-based guided play results in greater learning than direct instruction for all learners. This includes spatial learning (Fisher et al. 2013), reading and writing (Moedt & Holmes 2020), and mathematics (Zosh et al. 2018).
Social and emotional development
Children need healthy social and emotional development to learn and grow. It’s how they understand who they are and their relationships with others. It’s how they experience and regulate their emotions, develop close relationships with adults, actively explore their environment and learn. It’s what they need to be successful at school and throughout their lives.
Parents and caregivers play the biggest role in social-emotional learning, offering consistent experiences with young children through predictable interactions. Educators can support social-emotional development by incorporating activities that encourage interaction, taking turns and discussing emotions with young children. They can also help children understand their emotions by describing their own feelings and modeling how to calm down. They can provide challenges that require perseverance, such as encouraging children to keep trying at something they are having trouble with. And they can use screening tools like ASQ:SE-2 to reveal social-emotional strengths and identify any needs. This helps children feel confident and motivated to learn.
Physical development
Physical development allows children to explore their environment fully, and it contributes to cognitive development. For example, infants and toddlers who are physically healthy and active are more likely to interact with their environment and other people, and they are able to express their emotions in ways that allow them to communicate clearly.
They may show a range of movements such as balancing, jumping and stepping as well as imitating animals and playing with large ball games. They can also learn to ride on larger equipment such as bicycles or push prams.
One theory of child development is the nature vs nurture perspective, which recognises that both genes and experiences play a role in children’s physical development. For example, some children have stronger muscles than others, because their central and large muscle groups develop quicker. This is because they are exposed to more stimulation and activities, which build up myelinisation (the process of strengthening nerve fibre connections). This is why it is important to expose children to a wide variety of activities and environments.
Cognitive development
Cognitive development involves children’s reasoning, problem-solving, decision-making, and understanding skills. It is one of four significant developmental domains that include physical, social-emotional, and language development.
The understanding that young children construct information based on their lay theories can help teachers and parents design more effective educational materials for them. For example, research indicates that a child’s implicit theory about weight and volume can significantly influence their ability to perform a simple arithmetic task or participate in a classroom science experiment.
Piaget proposed that children progress through a series of discrete stages: the sensorimotor stage (birth to age 2), the preoperational thinking stage (2 to 6 or 7 years), the concrete operational thinking stage (6 or 7 to 11 or 12 years) and finally the formal operational reasoning stage (12 or 13 years and throughout life). Each of these stages is characterized by a transformation of the thought processes of the previous one. For instance, at the concrete operational stage, a child can think logically about tangible objects and events but cannot reason hypothetically.